Angus Buchan preaching in cow shit in Ireland.

“You can get the smell of the animals here, because the Kilkenny mart is just beside us,” Noreen Mulhall announces, before she starts swaying in her chair to the hymn How Great Thou Art.

It’s Wednesday evening, and Mulhall has come to the Hub in Kilkenny to hear controversial South African pastor, Angus Buchan. Prior to the event, some 40 people marched to the gates of the venue to protest the fact that Buchan has preached in the past that homosexuality can be cured through prayer.

Rosemary Parle from Kildare and her friend Hilary Anderson from Lisburn describe themselves as Disciples of Christ. They have arranged their holiday together especially to coincide with Buchan’s appearance in Kilkenny. Why?

“It shows how much God loves Ireland. That’s why Angus is here, because God wants us to hear good news, among all the bad news,” Parle explains.

‘So liberal’

“Unfortunately, Ireland has become so liberal in its thinking that we have strayed from the teachings of the Lord and taken on a humanistic view instead. A homosexual lifestyle goes against the covenant of marriage.”

Even though marriage between same-sex couples in Ireland is now legal?

“That’s not marriage,” Parle says. “Marriage is one man and one woman. Their bodies fit together. I’m sorry to sound crude, but it’s true.”

A group of friends have come from Carlow. Before Buchan ever takes the stage, Maria Doyle says she has already got everything she came for.

“We’re meeting our family,” is how she puts it. “Say someone went away to Australia, and then they came home. The whole family would come together to celebrate. That’s what it’s like here.”

‘A sin’

What do they think of Buchan’s views on homosexuality? “Homosexuality is a sin in God’s eyes,” her friend Julie Power explains. “Not the fact that two men love each other. The act. Sex together.”

By the time the event begins, the Hub, which has seating for 1,400 is full, including several children. Buchan jumps on stage and bellows, “I love the Irish, I really do! You are the most passionate people I have ever met.” He falls to his knees before the audience.

The crowd go mad. Camera phones flash.Buchan commands the crowd to stand up, and they spring to their feet as one. He paces the stage, Bible in hand, and ends every sentence with a shout.

“This is a much bigger crowd than I had last time,” he says appreciatively. “I’m speaking to bigger crowds now than I’ve ever done before in my life.” People whistle.

Then he gets going, on a speech that lasts for an hour, and during which nobody leaves the arena. “The Bible tells me to love my wife,” Buchan says. “I love my wife. If I love my wife, she will gladly submit to me.” He says this twice. The crowd roar. “My wife is two years younger than me. She looks like she’s 20 years younger than me. Do you know why? Because I love her. I look after her. I protect her. I provide for her, I put food on the table.”

Later he returns to the topic of a wife submitting to her husband, saying, “It’s very hard for a lady to submit to a man who is lazy, who doesn’t have the authority in the home, where the kids are running wild and tearing the house apart, and he won’t get out of his bed in the morning. I’m telling you the reality of life. So boys, it comes back to us, get off your behinds, do some work and put some food on the table, get that house looking good, and give your wife a chance to look feminine and beautiful.”

He continues, “My wife is beautiful. She smells nice. Her hair looks beautiful. She looks like a lady. I don’t want her to compete with me. I don’t want to go to a ladies prayer group. I’m a man. Do I look feminine?” He shrugs his shoulders in mock questioning, slapping his thighs, as his waits for a reply. “No!” shout the crowd back to him.

“Children, respect your elders. Respect your father and your mother. I discipline my children when they are naughty. I don’t beat them up, I discipline them. I give them a good hiding and then I love them to bits.” Loud guffaws from crowd. Pause from Buchan. “They’re all grown up now, and all my children are serving God, every single one of them, and that’s no coincidence, because Jesus is my friend.” Applause. It’s unclear if Buchan is referring to the fact he used to discipline his now grow-up children, or if he still does, but the crowd love his revelations anyway.

’Mouths washed out with Holy Ghost soap’

In an aside that refers to the media coverage he received in advance of his visit, he says, “Some of us are so negative that the devil has no work to do. Those people need their mouths washed out with Holy Ghost soap.”

“When you hear the name of Jesus, does a tear come into your eye? “Yes!” someone roars with a sob from the crowd. “Yes!” comes the sound of more voices. People near me start crying.

“I love families and I hate divorce. I think abortion is legalised murder. Why? Because the Bible tells me that. (This gets the loudest cheer of the evening.)

These are some of the other things Buchan says in his speech:

“I will pray tonight that God will give a baby to all those people who can’t have babies, I have done this all over the world. People have conceived because of my prayers.”

“What does a fundamentalist mean? It means I believe every word in this Book, the Bible!”

“Faith is contagious, just like doubt is contagious. I don’t want to be around doubt.”

“You have to lead from the front. There are people outside that need you. They are lost. If you don’t help them, who is going to help these people?”

“I’m the most peaceful man you’ll ever meet.”

“I love young people.”

“Believers go to Heaven, not good people.”

In between cheering, the audience are totally silent. They’re listening closely, leaning forwards. The evening ends with the crowd on their feet, assembling before Buchan for a collective blessing.

It’s hot in the Hub, with the crowds of people on a humid evening. Noreen Mulhall is right. The smell of the mart is unmistakable.

c“The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?” I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.

Ja Adriaan, some people who believe themselves to have a hotline to God do some stupid shit. Like setting up religious themed Bed & Breakfasts all over the street and then the economy stalls and on top of that there is new technology that allows trailers to be loaded onto trains instead of goods being transported all the way by truck. Shitty economy + less trucks on the road = far fewer B&B clients. Daar gaan jou belegging. Shit, this town is packed with B&B’s most of which are going tits up. Rather pray for rain, at least that sometimes happens.

I see the NG Church is still facing a dilemma regarding marrying gays. First they declared publicly that gay marriages are allowed to be performed by the NGC. Then a predictable negative reaction from the conservative factions within, resulting in an appeal to revisit. The end result is that until then(the appeal sitting or whatever they call it….), gays are allowed to get married in the NGC. However, after the event which by all accounts wIll have a predictable outcome, they will be disallowed again.

Talk about snookering oneself! As Mac always says: you can’t make this shit up!

yes Holy, this U.S. election is the most bizarre of its kind. Now Trump is tweeting about a former Miss Universe – Alicia Machado – supposedly having sex in one of those “big brother” type TV shows. Hillary Clinton brought up her name during the debate and accused Trump of being sexist for calling her “Miss Piggy” for being fat. I’m not sure if Trump owned Miss Universe in 1997 when Machado won, but allegedly she threatened a judge in Venezuela and had a child with a drug lord. Trump said he saved her job despite she being fat. Machado said that its because of Trump that she developed an eating-disorder, but according to a guy on the internet the Washington Post reported many years ago that she already had an eating-disorder. I wonder what the contract was concerning her weight pertaining to the beauty contest? Machado is now stumping for the Clinton Campaign. There is also a video of Trump playing a scene in a “soft-porn” video.

Whatever the truth, Clinton destroyed Trump with this woman because there are more woman voters than men in America. Woman will find Trump’s remark offensive and that’s what counts more. Having said this, I however think that Machado sounds like a very bad woman. But I give here the benefit of the doubt. For me this whole story reflect badly on Clinton, Trump and Machado. Seems like Trump got a bit of his own medicine. He should rather let this go. According to a leaked email from general Bill Clinton is still “d…ing” bimbos.

What an undignified election? Trump and Clinton the best candidates in America? What a joke!

This guy appearing in the video represent infowars. Most of the time these people speak hogwash but they were right about Hillary being sick. You can make up many conspiracy theories but sometimes you get it right. Infowars saif Trump won the debate many scientific poll saying otherwise.

“Perhaps the most formidably sceptical book in the history of theology, Pierre Bayle’s “Historical and Critical Dictionary”, appears to have been written by a Christian. It logically devastates one orthodox position after another, only to return, at the end of each entry, to its own orthodox positions – that Christianity is not rational, that if we were rationalists we could not possibly believe in it, and that therefore we cannot be rationalists and should simply cleave all the more strongly to our thoroughly irrational faith.”

And

“Kierkegaard often seems to oppose the prison of Christianity with all his loathing, before masochistically deciding that one can live only within the same prison. “One must be quite literally a lunatic to become a Christian,” he writes in his “Journal””.

From the introduction to “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus, written by James Wood.

Probeer jy vertel dat julle atijoote is ortodoks . . . It logically devastates one orthodox position after another, only to return, at the end of each entry, to its own orthodox positions – that Christianity is not rational”. . . .”

This is very bad news for Trump. I just dont understand why liberals are so offended. The people who should be offended according to their worldview are the evangelicals who mostly vote Republican. Independent voters will now prabably brake for Clinton. I dont see Trump getting out of this mess with woman. His only change for Trump is probably to expose (ok maybe better to open up to the public and show a volnurable and emotional side to him:))himself during the Sunday night debate. Gawd Trump and Clinton are the worst candidates ever.

I don’t think Donald Trump is quite right in the head. His bid for the presidency is costing him billions. He is apparently only worth a fraction of what he says he has, and even that could be a trumped up lie. Come the end of the election and Donald Trump will be singing the bankruptcy blues while playing one-handed poker – but hey, that’s a road he’s been down before.

Yes, I think he took a risk in wanting to become President. But I must be honest with you. I find the hypocracy in this whole election laughable. That includes both Republican and Democratic voters (Men and Woman) and the presidential candidates. For instance, I see a few of these Holywood types are throwing a tantrum over Trump and what he said in the bus. They accuse Trump of “sexual objecttification” of woman. They say all “sexual objecttification” is wrong. Yet both men and woman do a good job of objectifying themselves in movies and in normal everyday situations. The reality is that some kind of objectification where people are sexually attracted to eachoter, at least to some degree, must occur. Its normal behaviour. I consider myself a moderate with both liberal and conservative views depending on the subject.

And what I also find bullshit is Hillary Clinton’s story of how Trump “stalked” her during the debate. I watched the debate and cant see any of such nonsense. I’m sorry, I dont like her but I know that her lies will resonate with woman. There’s much better woman leaders out there such as Theresa May and Nicola Surgeon. I’m all for equality between Woman and men. But we have to define what equality realy mean. Can a woman for instance be allowed to compete against a man in a world boxing title fight and then afterwards complain that she got beaten up by a man.? I dont think so. I dont like radical feminism just as I dont like misogyny. Religion played a huge role over the centuries to undermine woman.

Love how he stands there and comment on Hillary’s looks. My question is – If it was a male candidate, would he still have said stuff about his looks? If not then clearly saying something about her looks was a priority to him. If it is so irrelevant why comment on it?

You are probably right about Trump losing the election. However dont count him out yet. I think the pollsters might be underestimating Trump’s support.

Take North-Carolina for instance. Democrats are more inclined to vote early. Republicans are more inclined to vote on election day. According to statistics so far Democrats and Republicans are roughly voting in the same proportianal numbers.

Republicans usually vote absentee-in-mail (% down in proportion to 2012). However Democrats are down (%) compared to absentee-in-person voting and that is where most voters cast their ballot by far. Looks like Trump have the momentum. It seems that African-Americans are not voting according to the same numbers as in 2008/2012 which is a negative for Clinton. A surprixe this year is that independents are more engaged to vote early this year and its difficalt to know what type of voters they are. Registered Democratic voters also voting in great numbers in terms of % to Democratic men.

We’ll have to see what happens but I dont think it will be the landslide currently predicted by pollsters.

Well, I was partly right Holy. Clinton won the popular vote by a small margin (the final results not in, but I’m confident that Hillary will win) and Trump won the electoral college and the presidency. People are now complaining about it but there is a reason for it – the country is called the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The polls still underestimated Trump’s support.

I’m tired of this election now and I want to get back to writing about atheism. However just a few last points:

The more I hear about Trump the more I like him in relation to Hillary Clinton and some of these “liberals” who turnout to be not so liberal after all. I have watched most of U.S. media (and also the MSM in South Africa and across the western world) and I’m sick and tired of them for the most part. I’m sick and tired of people getting fired from what they do good just for insulting another person religion (It’s called FREE SPEECH). I’m sick of people being banned from speaking at universities for merely holding a different opinion than what the leftist university establishment decides what is “right”. We have seen this also here in South Africa where academics must find other employment or are forced to resign. These so-called “liberals” and leftist in especially the humanities make me cringe and I’m not even a conservative per se. The conservatives are a matter for another day and there is thing about them I don’t like either.

I want to find out more about the Alt-Right movement. Donald Trump has appointed Steve Bannon to be his “chief-strategist”, yet he is considering appointing a gay man to be the U.S. ambassador to the UN. I don’t know if it is true but I hear Trump’s son-in-law is a Jew (his daughter Ivanka also a Jew now). Heck he is even hiring blacks and woman for his posts. He even said that he doesn’t have a problem with gay marriage but he is a little more conservative regarding abortion. Trump is not a true conservative or liberal (in the American sense), yet he is a kind of a western nationalists. Let’s face it, western culture is much more open to atheism that many countries in the Muslim world. Enough for now

“For humanist true-believer, all this may sound very pessimistic and depressing. [Explaining the humanists’ culture and his (Harari’s) prediction of what we could expect in future.] …. History has witnessed the rise and fall of many religions, empires and cultures. Such upheavals are not necessary bad. Humanism has dominated the world for 300 years, which is not a long time. The pharaohs ruled Egypt for 3,000 years, and the popes dominated Europe for a millennium. If you told an Egyptian in the time of Ramses 2 that one day the pharaohs will be gone, he would probably been aghast. ….. If you told people in the Middle Ages that within a few centuries God will be dead, they would have been horrified.

“Looking back, many think that the downfall of the pharaohs and the death of God were both positive developments. Maybe the collapse of humanism will also be beneficial. People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes. “

I read a good saying: “Make peace with your past so that it doesn’t screw up the present.”

I told it to a friend of mine and off the cuff he said: “Yes, but it is good to carry a grudge so that you don’t lose perspective.” I asked him what he meant by this. “If someone screwed you once, to forgive him is stupid. He’ll screw you again.”

Totally agree, Savage. Once bitten, twice shy. My fundie neighbour who I went cold contact with last June – on my insistence – is now trying to pry herself back into my life by chatting to our tenant. “How’s Holy? Why don’t we see her anymore?”

Yeah right, I’m respectable now that my husband has retired and been living at home for the last year. Before that the story was spread about that my husband had dumped me, in spite of my explanation that his line of work meant he had to move around. Even though he’s retired, he might be called on to take part in another project – so those wagging tongues will start up again.

What is it with these fundamentalists that they impose themselves on others? I’ve enjoyed perfect peace for over a year. I don’t want to be friends with fundamentalists, or their fundamentalist neighbours. You get two fundie families living next to each other on one street and all hell breaks loose – the gossiping, the shouting over the fence, the stalking, the prying, the lying.

And then they say: “It’s for your own good. We feel sorry for you. We’re here to be your friends. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Ashamed of what? I grow roses as a hobby. I’m into gardening in a big way. I read a lot. I’m writing a novel. Really evil stuff, that.

If you mind your own business they will make up all kinds of rubbish about you. Their minds are warped by the more horrible passages in the Old Testament; there is nothing “Christian” about them. Combine a poisonous mind with idleness and that’s when you get a crucifixion.

We meet our friends over a beer or glass of wine at the local pub, not shouting about Jesus over the fence. One thing about living in a small town is that you are never short of friends to chat with at the local restaurants. It’s one of the chief pleasures of living in the country. That, and the lack of traffic.

The fundie next door has had one of her bathrooms renovated so wants everyone to see it.

If I want to look at other people’s bathrooms I can go look on the internet.

Have you noticed how women who make a huge noise about their fancy new kitchen don’t actually cook? They live on smoothies and are vegans. “How about cream of asparagus soup then?” “Oh no, that’s too much hassle. And forget about roast beef, I don’t eat meat. If my husband wants a steak he can make a braai.”

Hey great news ! We may one day be shitting a lot of oil folks….. haha (lol)

Biofuels are often touted as an alternative to fossil fuels, but many depend on raw materials that would quickly become scarce if production were scaled up. As an alternative to these alternatives, the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day.

According to PNNL, the problem with using sewage as a source material for biocrude is it’s too wet and requires drying before more conventional processes can handle it. PNNL’s approach is to use HydroThermal Liquefaction (HTL) to turn the sewage into oil, which removes the need for drying.

In HTL, the raw sewage is placed in a reactor that’s basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 lb/in2 (204 atm) and heated to 660° F (349° C), which mimics the same geological process that turned prehistoric organic matter into crude oil by breaking it down into simple compounds, only with HTL it takes minutes instead of epochs.

“There is plenty of carbon in municipal waste water sludge and interestingly, there are also fats,” says Corinne Drennan, who is responsible for bioenergy technologies research at PNNL. “The fats or lipids appear to facilitate the conversion of other materials in the waste water such as toilet paper, keep the sludge moving through the reactor, and produce a very high quality biocrude that, when refined, yields fuels such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuels.”

The end product is very similar to fossil crude oil with a bit of oxygen and water mixed in and can be refined like crude oil using conventional fractionating plants. PNNL estimates a single person could produce enough waste for two or three gallons (7.6 or 11 L) of biocrude each year. This won’t put fear into the heart of the oil companies, but it does provide not only a fuel source, but also an alternative to treating, transporting, and disposing of sewage sludge.

Other benefits of the HTL process are that it can also be used with agricultural waste and other wet materials, the liquid phase can be turned into fuel and useful chemicals using a catalyst, and the small leftover solid residue contains phosphorus and other nutrients for fertilizers.

Drennan says the simplicity of the process has allowed for rapid development in only six years and it is now continuous and scalable. PNNL has licensed the process to Genifuel corporation in Utah, which has partnered with Metro Vancouver in Canada to build a Can$8 to $9 million (US$5.9 to $6) pilot plant that’s expected to go online in 2018.

Even college educated white women rejected Hillary. But by far the most white women who voted Trump are from rural middle America. They voted like their menfolk. White rural Americans are tired of being treated like trash. I feel for them, the same way I feel for white people in South Africa. Can you imagine any other country where white people are persecuted for what they say on Facebook while black people are free to threaten to threaten to murder whites in ALL the media?

You could also say that people watch “ritteltit” (love that word!) movies because it gives them an adrenalin lift and the excuse to scream a bit. If you watch a horror movie drunk, it’s not nearly so scary, it becomes funny instead.

I saw a badly acted horror movie when I was seven where the “murderer” carried a suitcase with a woman’s hand sticking out, asking people whether they would like a “lady finger” (name of a finger shaped biscuit). I was horrified, I didn’t find it funny at all. Small children take things literally.

“By equating the human experience with data patterns, Dataism undermines our main source of authority and meaning, and heralds a tremendous religious revolution, the like of which has not been seen since the eighteenth century. In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that “God is a product of the human imagination”. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: “Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is a product on of biochemical algorithms.” In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.”

Haha, I see the Afrikaner right-wingers are up in arms over a certain Mr. van Wyk who work for a publication that caters for farmers. Apparently he called those people demonstrating against EFF-members vandalising the “Oom Paul” statue “white trash”. My view is – he said it so what?. They sound like leftists who want to be the PC Police. Poor souls, these right-wingers and leftist liberals/communists? are all the same. I however also don’t agree with the actions of EFF.

On another note, look at this woman. Charging an innocent man with sexual harassment. And se is a politician in the liberal U.S. city of Seattle. She thinks just like radical feminist. For them close to everything is rape or sexual harassment these days.

Today we’re going to take a deeper dive into one of the most popular themes in science in recent years: the recognition that genetically, there is no such thing as race. Nothing in our DNA identifies us as Caucasian, Mongoloid, or Negroid, or lends any support to the idea that any of those classifications might exist at all. No gene or combination of genes is unique to any race. Race, says today’s common wisdom, is merely a “social construct” — it is a way we look at each other, make a snap judgement based on some obvious traits, and apply a label. This seems like a simple enough resolution of the question, and is not especially controversial. So why, then, does the question persist?

Humans are a relatively young species, and there is much less diversity among us than among other species. Consider how much chimpanzees look alike to us; and then consider that any two chimpanzees have about twice as many genetic differences between them than do two humans of greatly different size, shape, and color. Genetically, we are the most homogenous of any primate. Turns out that all those perceived differences between us don’t go very deep at all. But that hasn’t stopped some people from trying to make it seem so.

The classical definition of the races, which you can find repeated all over the Internet, comes from an old German encyclopedia, the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4th edition. It contrasts the skull, face, and nose shapes of Caucasians, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Caucasians, for example, are said to have long, narrow, high noses; Mongoloids have wide, short faces with projecting cheekbones; and Negroids have long skulls with prominent jaws. Reading the descriptions, and living in the melting pot of California, what’s clear to me is that I don’t really know anyone who matches any Meyers racial description.

But this chasm between today’s reality and obsolete racial descriptions is backed up by evidence that’s a lot more substantial than my personal observation. In today’s science, we don’t speak so much of races as we do of populations, loosely defined as a group with a certain frequency of certain alleles relative to others. To understand what that means, let’s go through some brief definitions.

An allele is one alternative form of a gene that usually has two possible variations, and usually one is dominant and one is recessive. A familiar example is one difference between Scandinavians and Asians: we’re likely to find a lot of the blue-eye alleles in the Scandinavian population, and a lot of the brown-eye alleles in the Asian population. The relative frequency of various alleles in different populations is what makes the populations look distinct from one another. The allele for red hair is found a lot in Ireland. Freckles, cleft chins, dimples, blood type, color blindness, earlobe shape, and countless other traits are all controlled by alleles.

Populations, defined this way, are not distinct from one another. They blend into each other. Populations are not bounded by lines, but by clines, which are gradations. A population as a whole has a certain frequency of alleles, but any given individual is somewhere along a cline, and it is difficult or impossible to tell which population he might be from.

A genotype is your genetic fingerprint. It’s the sum of all the inheritable genetic variations that make you an individual unique from everyone else. Your genotype is the dataset that we’d get by sequencing your genome.

Your phenotype, on the other hand, is a broader description. It includes all the observable traits that your genotype has conferred upon you, and also your learned behaviors and other environmental influences. Your phenotype is that combination of nature and nurture that makes you not just what you are, but who you are.

Genotype and phenotype can also apply to a single trait. A person’s genotype may include several alleles affecting eye color; his phenotype is the color that finally manifests itself.

It’s this difference between genotype and phenotype that has driven some apparent scientific support for racial stereotyping. One of the most dramatic examples was the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. One of the points made in the book was that there are racial differences in intelligence; a point which, it turns out, is indeed supported by the data; but, importantly, only if race did exist. The book triggered enormous controversy, both in favor of and opposed to its conclusions. Any useful discussion of this is well beyond the scope of a Skeptoid episode, but we can make one point. While the authors argued for a genotypical basis for intelligence, most criticism — and most of today’s scientists in the field — would argue for a phenotypical basis. When you’re born poor, badly educated, perhaps raised with English as a second language, drop out of school to join a gang — sounds like one or more familiar racial stereotypes, doesn’t it? — you are indeed more likely to score badly on an intelligence test. The evidence that we have today suggests that this is due to phenotype, which incorporates environmental pressures such as life experience and education.

Outside of science, the idea of race has, quite obviously, been responsible for a massive proportion of all the bad things in human history. Nearly everyone wants to discard it completely, but we can’t, because we find we still have needs for it. Race comes into play when we design programs intended to undo some of the harm that was done to certain populations. But perhaps least controversially, and most complicated, is the fact that we still need it for the medical and biological sciences.

A fundamental difference between race and ancestry is that ancestry is a bottom-up process, while race is a top-down classification. Except for their immediate siblings, every person on Earth has a different ancestry, and each of us has become — through countless generations — increasingly diversified from everyone else. Our ancestry includes all that we are, and it is unique to us. Race, however, discounts the intricacies of ancestry and instead takes a single superficial glance at a few basic traits, then rubber stamps us with one of a very few categories. Race is a label that dismisses a massive amount of data, so it would seem to be an idea that’s not of very much use to biologists.

Yet it is still used, and used a lot. The idea of race has hung on for so long in biological circles because many diseases are highly correlated with race. We had to understand why this is, in order to understand the disease and develop a way to fight it. So, even though it was politically incorrect, studying cystic fibrosis in “white people” or sickle cell anemia in “black people” made a certain amount of sense. Researchers and even healthcare providers still often ask patients to identify themselves by race, because the idea has always been that it’s a useful predictor of susceptibility to certain diseases, or of reaction to certain treatments.

This is largely wrong, but it isn’t entirely wrong. People who appear to be of the same race probably do share many of the same alleles, thus they’re also more likely to share the same disease-related markers. This is often the case with people from the center of a population, such as people with a deep Chinese heritage whose ancestors have lived in the same area for a thousand years. It’s far less likely to be the case in a country like the United States, where everyone’s ancestors came from populations all over the globe, each of whom followed a different braid of intermarriage to get there. So the likelihood is far less, but even people in the United States with similar physical appearances are more likely to share disease markers than are two people with different racial identifications.

This limited utility of a “race” classification in biology is becoming more limited with each generation, as populations become increasingly blended. About all it has going for it is convenience due to nearly everyone’s ability to self-report. But the convenience of access to bad data is not necessarily a merit.

The problem is that we don’t always have access to good data. Many of the alleles related to diseases haven’t yet been identified, so there are still a lot of cases where we can’t look at someone’s genotype and know their susceptibility to a certain disease. But in some of these cases, we can still look at them and say something like “Hmmm, you look Asian, you’ll probably react well to this particular drug.” It might not be right in this particular person’s case, but unless we have a family history that gives us better information, it might well be all we have to go on.

In some ideal future, we may have a Star Trek tricorder paired with a fully grokked human genome, and we’ll immediately know everything that genomics can tell a medical professional about any person. That day will come, but it is not here yet, not by a long shot.

So where does all of this leave us? With a reminder that genetics is an exciting field that should tempt any student. Even though the human genome has been completed, there’s a lot we still don’t know, and indeed including much that may never be known. Too much remains hidden in our genes for the biological sciences to completely abandon socially-derived categories for human beings. Race, however, brings little to the table; especially in a globalized populace, a visual phenotyping is past the point of utility in determining genotype. Population and ancestry are far more useful than race, but they are not always evident or available. Given the lack of a Star Trek medical tricorder, the simple fact is that we don’t have a solution yet. Biologists and geneticists must struggle on with inadequate tools.

Race, from a sociological perspective, still has relevance when we seek to help everyone achieve their potential. Although fraught with shortcomings, it still has an awkward place in some biological sciences. We can’t ignore the fact that the very idea of race has had devastating and offensive consequences to our history; that’s quite an accomplishment for something that provably does not exist. We find ourselves mired in a self-defeating bog of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t. The problem is not one with a tidy solution. But it is not a hopeless situation. With each passing day, the usefulness of race in any science diminishes, and then it will have no place at all. It will, ultimately, find itself in the landfill of discarded human follies where it so rightly belongs.

What a sanctimonious little prat Trevor Noah is. He thinks Americans will fall for infantile whining and white-blaming like a few South African whites still do. He is so arrogant he didn’t stop to consider he could be defeated on his own show. The ratings have not been kind to Noah lately which would explain his climbing on the BLM bandwagon. Is he coming back here to join the EFF?

He used very domineering, invasive body language with that white lady.